Ello all. I have run into a stumbling block. I have bt5 running in vm workstation 8. I have it set to nat as of the moment but i can switch it to bridged if needs be. Anyway i know that in vmware, the wifi of my host gets passed to the virtual machine as a wired connection. I can still browse internet but how do i use airmon, aircrack and wireshark or other wifi scanning devices in bt5 if my connection is simulated as wired even though the windows laptop is connected via wifi to my router? Is this a case where im gonna have to either get an adapter or boot up as a live os and not virtually? Thanks

NAT vs bridged doesnt matter for wireless, thats just the wired virtual network. For wifi sniffing in a VM you MUST use a USB adapter. Only other option is install baremetal OS, but chances are you are going to want a card compatible with your wifi tools and will probably end up buying a USB ALFA or TPLINK anyway.

Awesome. Thats good to know. Keeps me from running head into keyboard anymore. Haha. Ok, know if i install bt5 to a usb and boot off of that, i should be able to use my laptops internal card for wifi and scanning. That is to say that it is capable of doing so but it should be since it is a dell xps. ThanlsMatt

I wouldn't say that just "because it's a Dell XPS", that the internal card is good. You'll need to make sure your wireless chipset is compatible with aircrack, etc, if you want to be able to do injection. If you're simply scanning, then it'll likely be fine, but to actually inject, that's a different story.

Also if you are practicing Wireless hacking and such, you will need an adapter that can inject packets. Most standard wifi adapters that are built-in only support passive scanning. If you are working on gaining access to encrypted WiFi networks, you will need to be able to perform DeAuths to knock clients off so you can try and capture the re-authentication packets (I think I have that somewhat right). Alfa adapters are good for that. Not to mention they come with removable antennas so you can add more powerful ones to perform different attacks or cover a larger area.

hmm, ill have to double check if my internal can do packet injection. my old laptops internal can. haha i bought that thing back in 06. I will have to check up on these alfa cards you speak off. i like the idea of removable antennas. I build my own parabolic ones that i would love to hook up to my laptop. haha. or better yet, ill make the alfa card, if its usb, the focus of the dish.

The best i have done, i took a usb wifi adapter and hooked it up to my firends 8 foot diameter dish and pointed in in random directions to see what we could find. haha. 65 networks.